THE IDEA OF A COMICS ANNUAL isn't an especially new one, not even at the beginning of the 1960s when DC published Superman Annual 1 (Aug 1960). The earliest annual I could find in US comics was Archie Annual 1 (1950). By the time that was published, Archie had been established as a leading comics character for almost a decade. It must have seemed like a good idea to other comics publishers because pretty quickly, other annuals started appearing on the newsstands. During the 1950s, the concept of comic annuals was an interesting novelty. Where the UK comics market had had annuals for years, it took quite a few years before the American publishers caught on. Click image to enlarge. Tales of Terror Annual 1 was published in 1951 by EC, though unlike the Archie Annual that contained 116 pages of new material, canny Bill Gaines just stitched four coverless issues of assorted EC comics into a new cover. A year after that Dell Comics put out Tarzan's Jungle Annual 1 (1952), feat...
BACK IN THE LAST CENTURY I earned my living in the magazine business ... and the prevailing wisdom at the time was that you didn't ever - under any circumstances - mess with the magazine's logo. In fact, any kind of change to the magazine's masthead was frowned upon, and even re-branding exercises were viewed with much suspicion. In the last entry in this blog, I looked at the many times that Marvel Comics changed their magazine's logos during the 1960s ... it all seemed so much easier then. But even less acceptable was the idea that you could transform the comic's logo for just one issue for, oh I don't know ... Dramatic Effect. From a marketing perspective, that's an even bigger risk than changing the logo as part of the natural evolution of a magazine's masthead Strangely, though this blog focusses on Marvel Comics, and I've always maintained Stan Lee was far more willing to experiment with different approaches to comics and storytelling than his...